Contents

Brief Overview

Purpose: This Public Comment seeks community input on proposed incremental changes to the current strategy for ICANN Public Meetings. The proposed changes were developed by community leaders during a call on 17 August 2017 and detailed in a subsequent report prepared by ICANN.org.

Current Status: Community Leaders reviewed the report on proposed incremental changes at a meeting held 2 November 2017 during ICANN61 in Abu Dhabi and approved the publication to gather public comments.

Next Steps: ICANN.org will provide community leaders with a summary of feedback received from this public comment proceeding to facilitate a final decision on proposed incremental changes to the current strategy for ICANN Public Meetings.

Timing of this meeting would be the first meeting in the three-meeting annual cycle

Policy Forum (Current Duration: 4 Days)

Timing of this meeting would be the second meeting in the three-meeting annual cycle

Focused on SO/AC policy development work as well as cross community interaction and outreach

Annual General Meeting (Current Duration: 7 Days)

Timing of this meeting would be the third meeting in the three-meeting annual cycle and would include the Annual General Meeting (AGM) and would have a focus on showcasing ICANN’s work to a broader global audience.

Days should be optimized to allow some groups to conduct their activities over a shorter duration within the overall meeting timeframe.

Proposed Incremental Changes

Community leaders and representatives were asked what consideration, if any, should be made for changes to the meeting duration.

Community Forum

There were no recommendations for change to the duration of the Community Forum.

Policy Forum

Input suggests one additional day dedicated to outreach should be added for the mid-year Policy Forum for a total of five days.

Annual General Meeting

Community leaders raised concerns about the underutilization of the last day (Day 7) at the Annual General Meeting. They also ask that the announced meeting dates of the official ICANN Public Meetings guarantee constructive use of the participants’ time. Thus, we have two potential recommendations for the Annual General Meeting:

Keep the Annual General Meeting to seven days, but reorganize the work so that there is better use of participants’ time on day seven.

Or

Reduce the official dates published for the Annual General Meetings to six days, while keeping day seven available for the community to hold internal working meetings and wrap-ups.

Section II: Background

On 17 August 2017, ICANN.org hosted a call with community leaders to discuss questions about the criteria for ICANN Meeting venue selection, and potential updates to the current strategy for ICANN Public Meetings, which was approved by the ICANN Board in 2014 (See https://community.icann.org/display/soaceinputfeedback/Event+Calendar.) Community leaders and representatives on the call included: At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and RALO Chairs, Commercial Stakeholder Group (CSG), Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO), Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG), Registrar Stakeholder Group (RrSG), Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG), Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC), Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) .

ICANN.org prepared a summary of the discussion which included proposed incremental changes to the current meeting strategy. Fundamental changes to the meeting strategy were also discussed, however participants agreed to wait for a more comprehensive review of the current meeting strategy with the community to examine those issues and make informed recommendations for change.

ICANN.org presented the paper to community leaders on 13 October 2017 and solicited feedback from the group at a meeting on 2 November 2017 during ICANN60 Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi. As a result, community leaders directed ICANN.org to seek further input from the community via this public comment proceeding.

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Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."